The present invention is a method of making a guide for the ingestion of medicines.
The number of Americans that are over 65 is expected to double in the next 30 years from more than 35 million to more than 70 million. This aging population increasingly relies on prescription medications for the maintenance of health. Unfortunately, many patients are faced with a complex daily regimen of prescription medicines; supplements and over-the-counter drugs that are difficult manage. Although a great variety of pillboxes having compartments marked with the days of the week or month are available, these pillboxes must be filled repeatedly, usually weekly. It may be very difficult for family caregivers or gravely ill patients, especially the elderly, to fill the pillboxes correctly. On the market there are pill timers, pill organizers and pill crushers, but no pill identifiers.
Long-term care facilities and home health care programs face this problem many times over. They must keep track of the regimens of many patients. Even one medication error has the potential to result in great liability for such facilities and programs. Moreover, it is necessary to accurately administer medicines despite cost and staffing pressures that can be daunting to those operating these type of facilities and care programs. This year the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists report that xe2x80x9cMedication errors may account for one in 12 hospital admissions, one in eight emergency room visits, and occur once every 100 times drugs are administered in the hospital.xe2x80x9d
The phenomenon of medical professionals making errors that result in the ingestion of an unprescribed medicine, or an incorrect dosage of medicine, is a very serious problem today. It has been estimated that 7,000 patients die each year in the United States as the result of such errors. Moreover, this problem is likely to become even more serious in the future as the population ages and the already high rate (44% in the U.S.) of prescription drug usage grows larger with the discovery of new medicines.
Those responding to medical emergencies typically need to learn as quickly as possible what dosages of medication the patient has been taking. Heretofore, this has typically been attempted through a slapdash search of cabinets and pillboxes, with error, resulting complications and possible death the consequence.
A first effort to address the above noted problems is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,553,670, granted to Collins (xe2x80x9cthe Collins patentxe2x80x9d). Although the device of Collins is a sort of pill illustrator, with transparent containers for pills and associated areas for receiving written instructions, the bulky construction of the Collins device acts to drive up the price of the device and to prevent storage of a group of such devices together in a notebook. In addition, it appears that the device of Collins would not be reusable.
Another effort to address the above noted problems is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,372,258, granted to Yousef Daneshvar (the Daneshvar Patent). The Daneshvar patent does appear to disclose a pill sample illustrator having display spaces in which to place pills and associated places to write out instructions for pill consumption. It also appears, however, that the Daneshvar patent implicitly teaches that the illustrator be made out of substantially rigid materials. This is the clear message from the terminology of xe2x80x9cwallsxe2x80x9d and the illustrations, showing apparently substantially rigid walls defining a set of spaces.
This creates two difficulties. First, in the introduction of a new invention, the promoter is frequently faced with a xe2x80x9cchicken/eggxe2x80x9d problem of production costs. Without making a very large quantity of the product, it is difficult to reduce the production costs to the point where the product can be produced inexpensively enough to induce a large number of sales. Accordingly, a product that can be made inexpensively in small lots has the greatest chance of being made available at prices that the public will be willing to pay, leading to a virtuous cycle of increasing sales. The other disadvantage of the device of the Daneshvar patent is that it is somewhat stiff and bulky. As a result, a library of these devices would be bulky and difficult to maintain in an easily indexed form.
Additionally, various pillboxes and medical history containers have been disclosed, which, as they are not product guides, are not directly relevant to the present invention.
In a first separate aspect the present invention comprises a method of creating a guide to the use of a set of products, which includes an example set of the products. This method comprises providing at least one product guide apparatus that includes transparent, flexible material formed into a set of pockets of sufficient size to receive and retain any one of the set of products. The guide also includes material that can be written upon and an associative assembly, adapted to physically associate the material that can be written upon to the transparent flexible material formed into a set of pockets. A first one of the products is placed in a first one of the set of pockets and a second one of the products is placed in a second one of the set of pockets. Next, descriptions of the first and second products are written on the material that can be written upon.
In a separate second aspect the present invention is a product guide apparatus for displaying a set of products together with a written description of each of the products. The apparatus comprises, transparent, flexible material formed into a set of pockets of sufficient size to receive and retain any one of the set of products. In addition an associative assembly is adapted to physically associate material that can be written to the transparent flexible material formed into a set of pockets.